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Meet the winners of the biggest ever face-recognition challenge

Who’s who?

Blend Images/REX/Shutterstock

By Timothy Revell

The results are in from the biggest computer face-recognition contest to date.

Everyone from government agencies to police forces are looking for software to track us in airports or spot us in CCTV images. But much of this technology is developed behind closed doors – how can we know if any of it really works?

To answer this question, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been running the biggest face-recognition competition to date.

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The Face Recognition Prize Challenge tested two tasks: face verification and face search. Face verification is what phone manufacturers such as Apple – whose iPhone X, out last week, can be unlocked with your face – are trying to master. The software must say whether a face matches that of a known person. Face search is the harder problem. It requires finding every image of a person in a database of maybe millions of images.

Find a face

The winner of the face-verification task was a company called Ntech whose FindFace product can match a person’s face correctly 99.9 per cent of the time.

The face-search task was won by Shanghai start-up Yitu Tech. Given one guess, its software can pick out the right face in a gallery of a million mugshots 80 per cent of the time – a big deal for police looking for suspects in hours of CCTV images.

“The public need to know what the technology is capable of,” says Shuang Wu at Yitu Tech. “It’s just going to keep growing and growing. You can now find a needle in a haystack very reliably.”

According to the conference organisers we are now at the point where computers surpass human face recognition abilities. Given a gallery of a million faces there is no question that computers can easily outstrip humans, says Chris Boehnen at IARPA. But when it comes to comparing two images side-by-side, until recently humans still had the edge. “But there is some new research coming out soon showing that it’s now too close to call,” he says.

The power behind both winners is deep learning, an artificial intelligence technique that uses neural networks – software loosely based on the structure of the brain – that have many different layers. Each layer interprets different features of an image. These techniques underpin most face-recognition software around the world.